The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 754 contributions
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
As I have said, I am confident that the financial memorandum lays out the strategic costs, as it intends to do. Where there may be some uncertainty is where people want to know what the detailed costs of the secondary legislation will be, and, of course, we do not have that information, because that has yet to be developed. If there is a discrepancy, I assume that it is because local authorities and businesses and so on are looking for the detail that will come with the secondary legislation but is not part of the bill.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
I will pass that question to Alex or Janet.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
That is absolutely not the case. The legislation is only one piece of what we are doing. Our waste route map contains all the provisions that we are looking at, including matters around education, design, investment and research and development. Legislation is only one part. As I outlined in my opening statement, the bill sits in a very specific place between powers that we already have devolved in Scotland to do things—for example, as far as I am aware, we do not need any new powers to deal with a potential ban on single-use vapes; we already have those powers—and powers that are absolutely not devolved. We would not be able to bring in something such as extended producer responsibility for packaging in Scotland, because that is not a devolved matter. The bill is specifically narrow; it contains enabling powers to start work on legislation and provisions that fit within our devolution settlement for the very specific purposes of helping us on our journey to net zero, reducing waste and unlocking business opportunities for local authorities and the business community. The powers in the bill are to unlock those.
Once we know what those provisions are, we can target them very specifically on some very urgent matters. You will see from the financial memorandum how much handling disposable cup waste costs councils. We can all be outraged that perfectly good food and clothing is being sent to landfill and incineration instead of to those who desperately need it. The bill unlocks powers to take those things forward. It is right and effective that we unlock those enabling powers and target those specific areas of need efficiently, nimbly and proportionately.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
It is correct, according to the best estimates and the best information that we have. The assumptions in the financial memorandum are spelt out and we are providing the committee with the best information that we have available.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
We have not started the co-design process. Councils may decide that that is an outcome that they would like to go for. Through the co-design process, councils would need to decide that that is where they want to get to. We would then have to come up with a plan for how councils get to that point. I cannot anticipate what might come out of the co-design process.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
They are not, because, as my colleague Alex Quayle pointed out, the first step is to design the co-design process.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
The financial memorandum outlines the cost and potential benefits for each provision. On the overall economic benefits, I can, of course, enumerate to the member the urgency of reaching net zero and the overall intention of reducing waste in our society. Those inefficiencies where resources—
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
The bill’s provisions enable us to start the journey of looking at all the pieces that we need to put into place. Taking all those pieces through primary legislation would not be proportionate to what is being brought in, even in respect of parliamentary time.
We already have very good models for a lot of what is happening here. We have a voluntary code of practice, so bringing into legislation a more mandatory code of practice is a sort of logical next step. We are all familiar with the plastic bag charge and we could be bringing in a cup charge. The level of scrutiny needs to be appropriate to the changes that are being brought in, which is why we are proposing to bring in the detailed measures through secondary legislation. Scrutiny of secondary legislation can, to some degree, be as in-depth as committees and members wish it to be. We have had good recent examples of negative statutory instruments that underwent detailed scrutiny in committee and so on.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
Those are economic benefits. When a business is wasting materials, that is, of course, a cost to that business. It is also a cost to society when we, as a society, are using the planet’s resources to produce goods that do not benefit anybody. There is a larger case to be made: a circular economy, which is the point of this, is one that does not have waste and which is efficient, so that all our resources are put to best use. Those provisions fit in a larger scope of work, with the route map work that the UK Government is doing. They are all designed to improve the economic case and reduce inefficiency in the system.
Finance and Public Administration Committee
Meeting date: 7 November 2023
Lorna Slater
No. It is completely independent of the Scottish Government.